An Option on “Damnation Street”

What I guess is now the leading show business trade “publication” — Nikki Finke’s blog Deadline Hollywood — had a nice mention of a project of mine this week. And — cool! — this is my blog, so I get to link to it here:

Fox Hill Productions has optioned development and production rights to Andrew Klavan’s mystery trilogy Dynamite Road, Shotgun Alley and Damnation Street. Klavan has adapted the trilogy into a screenplay titled Damnation Street,described as a neo-noir thriller about a private detective and a serial killer in pursuit of the same mysterious woman. Producers on the project will be Samantha Lusk, Andrew Hyatt and Seth David Mitchell of Fox Hill (The Frozen, The Last Light and the upcoming The Stanleys).

Christian Toto at Big Hollywood picked up the piece and quoted me talking about how I’d condensed the trilogy into one story for the script, and how some of the approach of the book was derived from Clint Eastwood’s film Unforgiven:

“I always felt that was a great western that was also a movie about the western, an examination of the heart of those stories. Likewise the Weiss-Bishop books were meant to be top-flight detective stories that were also about detective stories, that held the genre up to the light so to speak.”

Anyway, an option is only one step on the long, long road to getting a film made, but it’s a good script and I hope it makes it to the screen.